The Department of English at Columbus State University invites applications for a tenure-track Assistant Professor position in American Literature before 1900 with emphasis in African-American literature.

The Department of English at Arizona State University-Tempe invites applications for a tenure-track position as Assistant Professor in American Jewish Literature with an anticipated start date of August 16, 2016. Interest in other cultural forms, such as theatre, film, television or digital media is desired. Comparative and transnational perspectives are welcome. The successful candidate will be a member of the Department of English and the interdisciplinary Center for Jewish Studies. The successful candidate will be expected to conduct research publishable in top tier academic journals, teach undergraduate and graduate students in the area of American Jewish Literature, and engage in professional, university, and community service as appropriate.

The Lydia Maria Child Society (LMCS) welcomes proposals on the topic “‘How Do You Solve a Problem Like Lydia Maria Child?’: Principles at Heart and at Work” for a panel to be held at the annual American Literature Association conference in San Francisco, CA, 26 – 29 May 2016 at the Hyatt Regency San Francisco (http://alaconf.org/annual-conference/).

At the core of Lydia Maria Child’s myriad roles as woman, writer, editor, intellectual, and human rights activist lay her deep conviction in social responsibility, a principle embedded and perpetuated within nineteenth-century American reforms in religion, education, temperance, as well as in rights for women, African Americans, and Native Americans. While Child sought to evoke and instill this principle widely throughout her career—from selecting pedagogically appropriate texts for the children’s magazine Juvenile Miscellany to championing Native rights in political pamphlets—her interventions in public discourse triggered reactions ranging from admiring approbation to social ostracism and thus have prompted the question that provides this panel’s focus.

LMCS seeks papers that explore the connections between Lydia Maria Child and problem-solving within the literary marketplace to flesh out and complicate our understanding of social responsibility—its meanings, risks, benefits, and opportunities—in Child’s lifetime and, perhaps, our own. Toward that end, we suggest papers that consider or play with the following ideas, either narrowly or broadly construed (though they are by no means exhaustive):

· What is unique about Child’s textual approach(es) to fostering social responsibility in children? wives and mothers? intellectual colleagues? the reading public? How did her techniques influence her contemporaries and their own ideas about or techniques within public discourse? What might we learn from those choices, and/or how might we apply them in our own time?

· How did Child navigate the intertwined worlds of public and private as she promoted principles of civic integrity? What might we learn from the ways in which she handled personal/professional adversity?

· What if the problem were perceived to be Child herself? What charges did her detractors level against her and to what end(s)? How did Child and/or her contemporaries respond to critics’ attacks? How might we best learn from their experiences?

Please send 250-word abstracts and a brief CV to Sandy Burr at sburr@nmu.edu by 10 January 2016

PSU is a coeducational, residential university located in the scenic heart of the Lakes and White Mountain Region of New Hampshire with an enrollment of approximately 4,300 undergraduate students and 3,000 graduate students. Plymouth State University invites applications for the tenure track position of Assistant Professor of English, with focus on Early American Literature, beginning August 2016.

The Department of English at Rutgers University, which has a long history of scholarship and teaching in African American Literature and Literature of the African Diaspora, announces two Postdoctoral Fellowships for scholars pursuing research in these fields.